12/31/95
I began the year hammered at a blackjack table in South Lake Tahoe. Shell, Tom, Big Mac, and I boomed up 395 through the cold and snowy Sierras in the silver Mustang with the souped up engine. I won $775, not counting a twenty-five dollar chip I found in my pants a couple of days after we got home. I came home with most of it, minus the hundred dollars or so that Shirelle and my brother, seemed to feel they were entitled to. Everytime I turned around one of them was hitting me up for another twenty bucks. They were already blind drunk, and they were just throwing it away on bad double downs, and longshot wheel of fortune spins. As my generosity ebbed they started calling me a cheap bastard and such. I tried to get Shrill out of the casino and took her into a people-packed elevator upstairs looking for a place to hide from my brother's insatiable appetite for handouts so we could dance or something. When I stepped off the elevator, Shirelle wasn't looking. There was this brief moment when I could have grabbed her hand or said something, and in the time I hesitated the door closed and away she went. Oh my God! I was free on New Years Eve! Devils tickled my belly. I plunged into the madness of revelers crowding the halls. Someone put a hat on my head and gave me a horn to blow and I was swept out into the river of people pushing through the streets. As midnight approached, girls were kissing everybody and then wham! I began to worry about Shirelle, I went to our motel room, a jacked up little place off the strip, empty pool littered with broken champagne bottles. I was afraid Shirelle wouldn't be able to find her way back. She probably hadn't even paid attention to the name of the place to ask directions or try to call. She was out there wandering the night. No doubt she'd already met some dudes who were willing to let her spend the night. Then what? She'd have to wander town in daylight trying to recognize the motel. Maybe she'd have to call home and have someone wire her some money to get back.
Around three or so she fell in through the door retarded and pissed, cursing, and I pretended to be passed out.
In February I lost all that money I had won in a lame weekend in Vegas with my my mom and aunt and uncle and cousins and grandma. Hanging out with them was cool, but the tables were killing me. What's the record for losing blackjack hands in a row? We were at Circus Circumcise, and I played ten bucks and lost and played ten bucks and lost and played ten bucks and lost and played twenty bucks and then doubled down and got twenty and the dealer got a twenty-one so I lost. So I went to the ATM for another hundred bucks and played ten and lost and played another ten and lost. Impossible! I bet a hundred. No one can lose this many hands in a row. I hit eleven and got three and stayed and the dealer won with sixteen. It's against the Law of Averages! I had to win eventually. I bet another hundred. I got two kings the dealer flipped over a queen and an ace. This is how it went for three days. When I couldn't get anymore money from the ATM until midnight on the last day, I took my cousins to the rollercoaster park behind the casino with my last twenty bucks. As soon as we passed through the doors into the park, we ran into a chick in a leotard and a top hat with one of those trays suspended from her shoulders that they use to sell cigars and cigarettes, only she used hers as a platform to do card tricks, pulling aces out of her ass and so on on, kind of a three card monte routine, where she she has you pick a card and it's a three and she puts it on the table and taps it, and now it's the fucking ace of spades or jack of offs. Every dealer in Vegas must now how to do this! I have not, and will not, play blackjack ever again.
Later that month I stood in a blizzard around a Manhattan city block drinking malt liquor and waiting to go into Saint Patrick's Catherdral and read for the part of Dean Moriarty to Francis Ford Coppola. I flew out at the urging of Johnny Bayles, ("You're perfect, man.") not knowing it was a cattle call of immense proportions. The temperatures hung in the thirties and the precipitation couldn't make up its mind between rain and snow, but the wind blew steadily and the gutters were full of sleet a yard out from the curb and you couldn't cross anywhere without submerging your feet in slush up to the ankle. My feet were near frost-bit by the time I had my audience with Coppola, whose ego flooded the cathedral, and who was only accepting resumes and auditon tapes near a box, by then. I hit the bastard up for an autograph for Mrs. Feeny back home. You could see his distaste battling with his ego, apparently some part of him still basked in the adulation. Rode the train back to Morristown and slept in my friend's mom's moldy basement, woke up choking in the night lungs filled with slush and spores, my inhaler back in California. Dumbass! In the middle of the night we talked a pharmacist into not letting me die.
Before I went home we rode the train to Coney Island and took pictures of the amusement park deserted and sunk in snow.
In March, the pretty latinas I work with in Pacoima talked me into going to El Presidente with them for a drink. I only had fifteen dollars; how much trouble could I get in? I don't know who was paying, but tequila shot after tequila shot passed my lips despite my weak protests. On the way home it was raining and the Z hydroplaned on the 118/5 interchange and slammed into the dividing wall. The police came. I blew a 0.16. Doh! Officer Beaver took me in, commenting on how lucid I seemed notwithstanding my Blood Alcohol Content and the bloody gash in my temple. They stitched my head up in the Van Nuys jail and Shirelle and the Insanity Pepper posted bail and picked me up the next morning. When I went to court, the San Fernando City attorney had no paperwork, and the case was dismissed. Go figure. The DMV had its way with me, though.
Silky's dad racked up his third DUI this year. When they let him out, he went home and shot himself in the head in the backyard.
I went North in the Toyota in June. Stopped in Humboldt or Eureka maybe and had some microbrews and watched the Dodgers Giants and got into a conversation with a guy about fifty who turned out to be the lead investigator of the Unibomber. We drank all night and he invited me out with some of his agents to go dancing, and paid for my beers and kept telling me that he was married but would I dance with whoever he pointed out so he could live vicariously through me, and I obliged. Later I met an honest to God Humboldt stoner, and we went back to his place and puffed and I slept on his couch, and he gave me a few joints for the road when I left in the morning.
I crossed into Canada with some crack in my truck. I drove up the coast. Stopped in Portland, got wasted on Ash Street. I was in a titty bar trying to buy weed or acid or shrooms or something, but all they had was crack, so I got that. When I pulled up to the border, I was a sweaty mess. It was Canada, though, I figured I'd just get waved through. I mean I've crossed the Mexican border twenty-five times and never been stopped coming or going. At the little kiosk, the guy with the clipboard asked questions. Did I have weapons, knives, guns, drugs, medicines, alcohol, syringes? "No, no, no," I said. I wasn't really thinking about the case of Miller Lite in the back of the truck under the camper shell, syringes (for inflating bait) in my tackle box, a hunting knife, asthma medicine, an ashtray full of half smoked marijuana joints, and a toilet paper tube with a bag of crack packed into it with snotty tissue. The dude with clipboard looked in through the window of the camper shell. "Is that beer?" "Oh, yeah. I forgot about that." He gave me a slip of paper and told me to park in stall number so and so. I actually thought they were just going to give me some pamphlets or something, but a guy and a gal in Customs Officer's uniforms came out, pulled on latex gloves, and told me to stand on an x on the asphalt a few feet from the car. Now, my screwed up mind started to vaguely wonder what all I had in there. When I got to the roaches and crack, the sweat really started pouring out of me. The officers spent many minutes going through the car. They were both young. Then they called me over. "Mr. Zurn, enjoy your visit to Canada."
Wha? Hoh? "Uh...thank you." Drove out of there flabbergasted.
I dipped a cigarette in the crack in the bathroom of a bar in Vancouver somewhere. Didn't feel a thing. I hired a boat the next day and struck out trawling for salmon in Horseshoe Bay. Saw a one-eyed seal. Visted the Capilano Bridge.
On the way back I slept with the wapiti and sasquatch in Olympia, and capsized my kayak at at Orcas Island. Back in San Francisco I picked up a copy of the Chronicle, and there on the front page was the picture of the FBI guy I had met in Eureka the week before, at a news conference because the Unibomber had released his manifesto.
And there was that whole Cabo thing this year. Uh, whoa.
Shirelle moved in, moved out, and moved in again. Glen the Wonder Boy stayed with us for a few weeks.
I'm having an early cocktail at the Hollywood Athletic Club. Blah tiddly bla blah.
The top fifty albums of the year are counting down on the radio. Folks scurry about preparing the balloons for midnight. I'm all scatterbrains, recalling all at once--It's hard to believe. The whole year gone! Should I quit smoking in '96? Of course, I should. A lady on the radio says grimly that every man's conscience is vile and depraved. I disagree.
I began the year hammered at a blackjack table in South Lake Tahoe. Shell, Tom, Big Mac, and I boomed up 395 through the cold and snowy Sierras in the silver Mustang with the souped up engine. I won $775, not counting a twenty-five dollar chip I found in my pants a couple of days after we got home. I came home with most of it, minus the hundred dollars or so that Shirelle and my brother, seemed to feel they were entitled to. Everytime I turned around one of them was hitting me up for another twenty bucks. They were already blind drunk, and they were just throwing it away on bad double downs, and longshot wheel of fortune spins. As my generosity ebbed they started calling me a cheap bastard and such. I tried to get Shrill out of the casino and took her into a people-packed elevator upstairs looking for a place to hide from my brother's insatiable appetite for handouts so we could dance or something. When I stepped off the elevator, Shirelle wasn't looking. There was this brief moment when I could have grabbed her hand or said something, and in the time I hesitated the door closed and away she went. Oh my God! I was free on New Years Eve! Devils tickled my belly. I plunged into the madness of revelers crowding the halls. Someone put a hat on my head and gave me a horn to blow and I was swept out into the river of people pushing through the streets. As midnight approached, girls were kissing everybody and then wham! I began to worry about Shirelle, I went to our motel room, a jacked up little place off the strip, empty pool littered with broken champagne bottles. I was afraid Shirelle wouldn't be able to find her way back. She probably hadn't even paid attention to the name of the place to ask directions or try to call. She was out there wandering the night. No doubt she'd already met some dudes who were willing to let her spend the night. Then what? She'd have to wander town in daylight trying to recognize the motel. Maybe she'd have to call home and have someone wire her some money to get back.
Around three or so she fell in through the door retarded and pissed, cursing, and I pretended to be passed out.
In February I lost all that money I had won in a lame weekend in Vegas with my my mom and aunt and uncle and cousins and grandma. Hanging out with them was cool, but the tables were killing me. What's the record for losing blackjack hands in a row? We were at Circus Circumcise, and I played ten bucks and lost and played ten bucks and lost and played ten bucks and lost and played twenty bucks and then doubled down and got twenty and the dealer got a twenty-one so I lost. So I went to the ATM for another hundred bucks and played ten and lost and played another ten and lost. Impossible! I bet a hundred. No one can lose this many hands in a row. I hit eleven and got three and stayed and the dealer won with sixteen. It's against the Law of Averages! I had to win eventually. I bet another hundred. I got two kings the dealer flipped over a queen and an ace. This is how it went for three days. When I couldn't get anymore money from the ATM until midnight on the last day, I took my cousins to the rollercoaster park behind the casino with my last twenty bucks. As soon as we passed through the doors into the park, we ran into a chick in a leotard and a top hat with one of those trays suspended from her shoulders that they use to sell cigars and cigarettes, only she used hers as a platform to do card tricks, pulling aces out of her ass and so on on, kind of a three card monte routine, where she she has you pick a card and it's a three and she puts it on the table and taps it, and now it's the fucking ace of spades or jack of offs. Every dealer in Vegas must now how to do this! I have not, and will not, play blackjack ever again.
Later that month I stood in a blizzard around a Manhattan city block drinking malt liquor and waiting to go into Saint Patrick's Catherdral and read for the part of Dean Moriarty to Francis Ford Coppola. I flew out at the urging of Johnny Bayles, ("You're perfect, man.") not knowing it was a cattle call of immense proportions. The temperatures hung in the thirties and the precipitation couldn't make up its mind between rain and snow, but the wind blew steadily and the gutters were full of sleet a yard out from the curb and you couldn't cross anywhere without submerging your feet in slush up to the ankle. My feet were near frost-bit by the time I had my audience with Coppola, whose ego flooded the cathedral, and who was only accepting resumes and auditon tapes near a box, by then. I hit the bastard up for an autograph for Mrs. Feeny back home. You could see his distaste battling with his ego, apparently some part of him still basked in the adulation. Rode the train back to Morristown and slept in my friend's mom's moldy basement, woke up choking in the night lungs filled with slush and spores, my inhaler back in California. Dumbass! In the middle of the night we talked a pharmacist into not letting me die.
Before I went home we rode the train to Coney Island and took pictures of the amusement park deserted and sunk in snow.
In March, the pretty latinas I work with in Pacoima talked me into going to El Presidente with them for a drink. I only had fifteen dollars; how much trouble could I get in? I don't know who was paying, but tequila shot after tequila shot passed my lips despite my weak protests. On the way home it was raining and the Z hydroplaned on the 118/5 interchange and slammed into the dividing wall. The police came. I blew a 0.16. Doh! Officer Beaver took me in, commenting on how lucid I seemed notwithstanding my Blood Alcohol Content and the bloody gash in my temple. They stitched my head up in the Van Nuys jail and Shirelle and the Insanity Pepper posted bail and picked me up the next morning. When I went to court, the San Fernando City attorney had no paperwork, and the case was dismissed. Go figure. The DMV had its way with me, though.
Silky's dad racked up his third DUI this year. When they let him out, he went home and shot himself in the head in the backyard.
I went North in the Toyota in June. Stopped in Humboldt or Eureka maybe and had some microbrews and watched the Dodgers Giants and got into a conversation with a guy about fifty who turned out to be the lead investigator of the Unibomber. We drank all night and he invited me out with some of his agents to go dancing, and paid for my beers and kept telling me that he was married but would I dance with whoever he pointed out so he could live vicariously through me, and I obliged. Later I met an honest to God Humboldt stoner, and we went back to his place and puffed and I slept on his couch, and he gave me a few joints for the road when I left in the morning.
I crossed into Canada with some crack in my truck. I drove up the coast. Stopped in Portland, got wasted on Ash Street. I was in a titty bar trying to buy weed or acid or shrooms or something, but all they had was crack, so I got that. When I pulled up to the border, I was a sweaty mess. It was Canada, though, I figured I'd just get waved through. I mean I've crossed the Mexican border twenty-five times and never been stopped coming or going. At the little kiosk, the guy with the clipboard asked questions. Did I have weapons, knives, guns, drugs, medicines, alcohol, syringes? "No, no, no," I said. I wasn't really thinking about the case of Miller Lite in the back of the truck under the camper shell, syringes (for inflating bait) in my tackle box, a hunting knife, asthma medicine, an ashtray full of half smoked marijuana joints, and a toilet paper tube with a bag of crack packed into it with snotty tissue. The dude with clipboard looked in through the window of the camper shell. "Is that beer?" "Oh, yeah. I forgot about that." He gave me a slip of paper and told me to park in stall number so and so. I actually thought they were just going to give me some pamphlets or something, but a guy and a gal in Customs Officer's uniforms came out, pulled on latex gloves, and told me to stand on an x on the asphalt a few feet from the car. Now, my screwed up mind started to vaguely wonder what all I had in there. When I got to the roaches and crack, the sweat really started pouring out of me. The officers spent many minutes going through the car. They were both young. Then they called me over. "Mr. Zurn, enjoy your visit to Canada."
Wha? Hoh? "Uh...thank you." Drove out of there flabbergasted.
I dipped a cigarette in the crack in the bathroom of a bar in Vancouver somewhere. Didn't feel a thing. I hired a boat the next day and struck out trawling for salmon in Horseshoe Bay. Saw a one-eyed seal. Visted the Capilano Bridge.
On the way back I slept with the wapiti and sasquatch in Olympia, and capsized my kayak at at Orcas Island. Back in San Francisco I picked up a copy of the Chronicle, and there on the front page was the picture of the FBI guy I had met in Eureka the week before, at a news conference because the Unibomber had released his manifesto.
And there was that whole Cabo thing this year. Uh, whoa.
Shirelle moved in, moved out, and moved in again. Glen the Wonder Boy stayed with us for a few weeks.
I'm having an early cocktail at the Hollywood Athletic Club. Blah tiddly bla blah.
The top fifty albums of the year are counting down on the radio. Folks scurry about preparing the balloons for midnight. I'm all scatterbrains, recalling all at once--It's hard to believe. The whole year gone! Should I quit smoking in '96? Of course, I should. A lady on the radio says grimly that every man's conscience is vile and depraved. I disagree.
posted by johnz at 11:21 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home